Jared Eckert Reading Response #1

            I think you’ll find most teachers would agree that our generation’s literacy is slowly decaying. And that texting, facebook, and other social networking sources are to blame. Professor Andrea Lunsford at Stanford University says they could be more wrong.

            “I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization.” Lunsord says. She believes technology is resuscitating  our ability to write and lifting it into bold new horizons.  Andrea has collected 14,672 writing samples from her student from 2001 to 2006. These samples span from in-class assignments, formal essays, emails, blog posts, and even chat sessions. According to the professor, young people today are writing way more than any previous generation. We can thank technology for that one. Thirty-nine percent of the writing Stanford students did was outside of the classroom.

            But is rise in writing good? Andrea found that students have become quite adept to “kairos” which is assessing who their audience is and adjusting their tone and technique to get their point across the best.  When interviewed, students thought good writing was something that had an effect on the surrounding world. To students, Writing has become more focused on organizing, debating, and persuading. This is because young people today have a very large audience. The world wide web. In fact, students at Stanford almost seemed to care less about their graded writing then other personal or recreational writing because their audience only consisted of the professor. What about short  hand and those smiley faces? Isn’t that creeping into our academic writing? Professor Lunsford says she didn’t find one example of texting speak in a class assignment. Even from her first year students.

            My own view is that text has become more important and has more of an impact on people our age then many other things. I myself have a personal blog and I find expressing feelings, views, and opinions in writing to a large audience to be just as valuable and fulfilling if not more than getting a good grade for a class essay or finishing a school book. I feel like words have power again. I believe that with the increasing number of internet users put their voice there on the web we can help solve problems together. Address issues on a enormous scale. Collaborating with each other on comment goals for the greater good, while also arguing personal opinions all of which make us diverse and unique. And I think there is a scarce shortage of that now days. On the other hand, I have found people my age abusing the text short hand into normal, constructive writing. Those people who choose to be illiterate have no one to blame but themselves.  Therefore they shouldn’t have the pleasure of having labeled our generation an age of illiteracy. 

            In conclusion, there may be some evidence of texting, and twitter eroding out ability to construct formal pieces of prose but I couldn’t agree more with Professor Lunsford on the writing revolution exploding this very moment. Due to her over whelming proof and my own personal experience.